Steam Game Festival Event Lineup: June 16th - 22nd

OFF GRID is part of the Steam Games Festival:  Summer Edition, now running from June 16th to 22nd!  The date may have changed, but our plans have not!

If you recieve our newsletter, you will already be in the know - if not, that's a gentle reminder to go sign yourself up now.  :)

What can you expect during the Steam Game Festival starting Tuesday?!  Plenty!  We've got SIX ways to for you to join in the fun: 

1.  Download and play a free demo of OFF GRID!

Starting 10am PDT, June 16th - 22nd

Yep, you heard that right!  It's time limited, but it will be there for you to get a taste.  Head on over to the OFF GRID Steam page and get your fix!

2.  OFF GRID Developer Q&A

Tuesday, June 16th, 10am PST / 6pm BST

Questions at the ready, because you can ask us anything!  We'll be taking questions in the live Steam Broadcast chat AND via reddit. 

3.  Chinese OFF GRID Play Along

Wednesday, June 17th, 1pm BST / 8pm CT

Join us for a play along Q&A session for the Chinese audience with our fried Hao who is keen to help OFF GRID reach his home country of China.  He'll be leading a Q&A session for us and translating the interview into Chinese live as we play through the demo.

Hao runs his own small studio, Flying Hammer, and is a concept designer, game developer, animator and entrepreneur working in both the UK and China, making educational games and animations.  He is passionate about gaming culture exchange and helping get indie games like Sable, and now OFF GRID, seen in his homeland!

**Disclaimer** At the moment, OFF GRID isn't translated to Chinese, but we are keen to help support Chinese players with the limited resources we have as a four person indie studio.  We have translated our Steam page to make a start in this direction, and have modding support for the game that we hope can mean at the very least, that Chinese players will be able to add Chinese localisation mods of OFF GRID to the Steam Workshop.  We will do our best to aim for an official Chinese Translation of the game at some point post-release. 
 

4.  OFF GRID DevStream:  CCCamp Mod

Thursday, June 18th, 12 noon PDT / 8pm BST

Part of our reguarly stream series - we'll be back with the infamous mc.fly and Mitch Altman - a seriously cool hardware hacker and inventor of TV-B-Gone on the lineup!  We'll continue modding & making the hardware hacking area in our CCCamp mod, which Mitch runs IRL.  

5.  OFF GRID Livestream + Showcase:  Steam Game Festival Edition

Saturday, June 20th, 12 noon PDT / 8pm BST

This special edition livestream will be a chance to:

• explore OFF GRID's unique mechanics and how they were created
• speak with the hackers who have consulted on the game for realism and feature as characters
• showcase OFF GRID's moddability and how you can craft and contribute to the stories within the universe

6.  Hacker Hangout Livestream

Sunday, June 21st, 12 noon PDT / 8pm BST

A chance to just hang out with the hackers, hactivists and heros that inspire OFF GRID.  We'll do a livestream so that you can see more of the game, and we can chat about all things hacker culture as we do.  Ask your questions in Steam Broadcast chat, and we can have a good ol chinwag about all things that they can legally answer.  We'll be joined by Lauri Love, pathfinder, mc.fly, and more!

We stream direct from Steam Broadcast, as well as Twitch and YouTube - be sure to join in! 

We're looking forward to the start of the festival!  In the meantime, you're welcome to join our Discord if you haven't already.  We've got a good group of people - they're a sharp, fun bunch - be great to have you in there, too!

SEE YOU THERE!

The OFF GRID Team


If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

That's right, in just over 24 hours, Off Grid will be live on Kickstarter!

Launching on Tuesday, October 9th, you will have the opportunity to:

-PLAY A FREE DEMO of Off Grid
-Secure your copy from as little as £8 (SUPER EARLY BIRD!)
-Get your name or handle in the game
-Help shape the game via our FIRST ACCESS program!

...and much more!

The campaign goes live at 4pm BST. That's:

4pm London / 5pm Berlin / 11am New York / 8am LA

Get in there quick to get the best deal on the game! Some reward tiers are limited... you don't want to miss out!

Help us spread the word! Share our posts, tell friends when you've backed, and let us know that you have by using #offgridthegame on social media!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

The Off Grid Team

If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

Off Grid is Kickstarting!

BIG NEWS! We'll be running a Kickstarter campaign in October!

 Get ready for:

• a playable demo
• the first ever opportunity to secure a copy of Off Grid
• a chance to get behind the scenes and help shape the game

The Kickstarter will go live:

Tuesday, October 9th


Please consider backing us if you are able! If you're not able to, please share, share, share.  Every pledge, like, wishlist and follow means a lot!

We'll be asking for feedback on our campaign via Discord this week - hop on in there to get a preview of the campaign & tell us what you think: https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ


Join the mailing list for news and updates at http://offgridthegame.com/newsletter

We can't wait to share the campaign with you.

Thanks everyone!

The Off Grid Team

If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

Thursdays = Dev Stream Days!

Hello!

That's right, Thursdays are Dev Stream Days! We'll be chatting all things Off Grid, show you in-game play, hacking, modding, and more...

Here's what you need to know:

When:

Every Thursday

What time:

5pm BST / 12pm EDT / 9am PDT

Where:

https://www.twitch.tv/semaeopus

Ask questions via twitch, or in our Discord's #hack-the-planet channel! Join the discord here: https://discordapp.com/invite/NDEVwBJ

ICYMI: We've done a couple dev streams already! One featured hacker Darren Martyn, Pwnsauce of LulzSec fame, and in another, Rich intro'd the game and went through some basic lua device scripting.

Videos are also posted to our YouTube channel after the fact - hop on over there and have a gander:
https://www.youtube.com/offgridthegame

Hope you can tune in!

The Off Grid Team 


If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

Discord = OPEN! Dev chat TODAY 9pm BST / 4pm EDT

Good news!

We've been having fun today with a little soft launch of the Semaeopus discord server!

We invited our newsletter subscribers in for a little *exclusive* dev AMA session earlier - and now we're ready to welcome the rest of you out there in the big, wide world.

Join us in Discord!

https://discord.gg/NDEVwBJ

Get your questions ready...

The devs will be online again at 9pm BST / 4pm EDT / 1pm PDT today to welcome you and answer any qestions you have!

Look forward to chatting with you soon!


If you haven’t already - be sure to wishlist Off Grid on Steam - each wishlist makes a big difference to us, and we really appreciate your support!

Dev Blog Post 5.12.2017 - Social Engineering and Distracting Noises

We’ve been working with a bit smaller team for this sprint, so this is going to be slightly shorter blog post than usually. And we’ll switch the format slightly as well, so you’ll get a section from both of us telling about what we’ve been up to…

Steve:

My first month has flown by! It’s been great to get started and become acquainted with Unity, which has impressed me. I started off on Off Grid by poking around the existing code, and playing the demo level, which gives an good overview of where the project is. After that I was forced to do some real work; first of all, I exposed the ‘Noise’ system to Lua, meaning modders will be able to play sounds that the AI will investigate. I’ve also fiddled with the camera, with the Lua setup, the wiki, and a fair few under the hood changes that hopefully will help us create new content more quickly. Exciting times ahead!

Pontus:

Character profiling

We had already previously converted the text files we use to describe each character’s personalities and background information from old XML files into Lua. But as we'de designed some of our data mechanics, and especially the social engineering aspect of hacking and privacy bit further, we realised the profile format we had would not do the job.

So, in this sprint I’ve worked on re-designing the character profiles to use a tag-based system that allows us, and the modders, to easily add pretty much any amount of background information about the characters, and tag that data in a way that lets us then attach those tags to different data points, files and whatever inside the game, and hook it into the AI’s behaviours easily.

(and same as with our mission progression system and many other things, the design goals and explanation how it works ended being much more complicated than the actual implementation, so no need to worry, this is really simple system for modders to use and should be very extensible and flexible for all the crazy weird hacking stories and tools modders might come up with which we never even thought about…)

While doing the required changes for this, I also added few quality-of-life improvements, so the levels can now automatically load character profile files, and the image files used for character colour customization, both from the level’s own folders and from the Common folder used for sharing things that might be used in multiple levels. This means that we don’t need to duplicate character files to each separate level where the same character might appear, and also modders will have easy access to some pre-made characters they can use in their own levels without having to even bother with the actual character profile files until they want to create some new characters of their own.

Sending SMS, with Lua

We are then using those character profiles to generate text messages (and eventually e-mails, and other files as well) that get sent to all the characters, and that the player than intercept, read though, and use to learn about the characters (maybe to figure out how to distract a specific guard, or to help guessing someone’s password, and so on).

This is nothing new, the SMS system has been in place for long time already. But the source file we used for the SMS templates was the last remaining XML file in the game, so of course that had to be converted to Lua as well… If nothing else, it’s more consistent and easier for everyone to deal with the same language throughout the project, but it’s much more human-readable syntax as well.

To take things a bit further than that, we thought that maybe the actual code used to generate the messages could also be moved into Lua. This certainly isn’t something you’d want to mess around for every mod you make, as it’s a bit more complicated than the rest of our mission and character files, and the actual content you see in-game can be changed easily by just creating different character profiles anyway. But exposing that code to the modders might open some interesting opportunities, maybe for localizing the message generation to some language with different grammar than what English has, or to build something more complicated than what the base game needs to go with some awesome mod you are making. We’ll see what happens!

Oh, and of course I made sure both the template file and the actual message generator code can be loaded from both the Common folders as well as from the level-specific folders, just like with the character profiles.

Outro

That’s everything for now! We’re not quite sure yet if we’ll have a short sprint (and one more blog post this year) or if we should just make it a long one and return back to you in 2018! Either way, we’ll make sure to let you now when the next blog post is out!

Off Grid sprint update 02.03.2017 - A little *more* conversation

A little more conversation, a little more action, please!


Somebody must have been listening to a little Elvis Presley around here. Are you dancing in your seat a little bit? We are! :P

Annnnnnyway - a merry March to you!  We’ve had a good February, full of all kinds of progress, on systems, content, and biz dev, so without further ado, here’s our action:

Finishing the city map

There were few small details we wanted to do on this pass of the city map scene left for this sprint:


First, what would a map be without proper markers? We replaced the placeholder ones featured in last dev blog post with new ones, this time drawn on the UI side. Not only do they look cleaner, but also this means we can more easily switch markers for different missions; for example, to differentiate between side quests, or different story lines and content coming from different mods.

…and then, we added support for multiple missions taking place in the same location, or in same city district. Just because it seemed like a good idea. We’ll still need to add the UI stuff for selecting between the missions if they are available at the same time, but on the code side, things are already in place.

Sprint Update - 02.12.16 - Workshop til you drop

Hello hello!
This sprint has been all about the behind-the-scenes:  stuff you would never know about while playing the game.  Just as well you are reading this blog then, eh!  We got a whole lot of release planning done and have our road map to alpha defined with greater granularity, at least for an agile project that is! ;P  We have done some early spring cleaning by upgrading our version control servers (in fact, entirely renewing them) and in project terms, we have mainly been working on our platform abstraction, Steam Workshop integration, and cleaning up some of our old props that were using materials inefficiently.

Now as an overview, that may all sound a little dull, but we promise there are some gems in here - especially if you are a fellow game developer running a similarly sized project.